A hacker going with the handle of @AerithXOR hacked the official website of Ottawa city, Canadian Supreme Court and Ottawa police.

The hack was conducted under the banner of #opSoaringEagle in which Ottawa city website was left with a deface page along with a message and personal details including name and email address of a police officer involved in the arrest of a 16-years-old kid for allegedly using social media to spread terrorism hoax around the country.

@AerithXOR took down the official website of Ottawa police (www.ottawapolice.ca) and Supreme court (www.scc-csc.gc.ca) through a massive DDoS attack, forcing the servers to stay offline for more than 24 hours.

The deface page on Ottawa city website had a message against the police officer and a warning to expect more damage. The message is available below:

"Joel Demore: You laugh at us, you are scared of us, does this help your laughing?" the hacked website read. "We can destroy everything, this is a flex of our power. Please, test us. You know what we want."

A full preview of the deface page:

Why the kid was arrested:

On 9th May 2014, the youth was charged with 60 offences including uttering death threats, conveying false information with intent to alarm, public mischief and mischief to property. “Swatting” is the term used by police to describe faking emergency calls to create a hoax or get revenge. The twitter handle used by the youth is @ProbablyOnion2. (which is now hacked by @AerithXOR).

Why hacker targeted these sites:

We had an exclusive conversation with @AerithXOR in which he seemed concerned about the whole issue . He told us that he stands with the affected family and claimed that the youth is innocent and victim of false arrest.

Reason:

''We are hacking and taking down these websites are retaliation against wrongful arrest and prosecution of a 16-year-old Barrhaven teen. The grounds he was arrested on? An IP address, SERIOUSLY? IP addresses can be faked. This fact must be known to the world, that IP addresses can be faked, and it's merely child's play to do so'', according to the hacker.

Why did you exposed the identity of the police officer?

''The officer who's information was posted onottawa.cais the investigating officer whom refused to investigate anything, and simply got given a case from the FBI and made an arrest, based off an IP address. Let me also tell you this, the FBI obtained information about the IP without a search warrant, this is illegal, the hacker told HackRead.

The Family:

The father of teenager accused of making fake calls to emergency services across North America says he has new evidence to prove his son’s innocence, thanks to someone purporting to be the vigilante hacker groupAnonymous, according to Ottawa Citizen.

Pastie message from AerithTOR hacker:

”Greetings World. As you are aware, yesterday, we hacked and deface Ottawa.ca. This is just the start. We will not rest, we have already hacked ottawa police’s mail server, stolen all email logs incoming and outgoing. We will be posting those shortly. We are going to be defacing the Ottawa Police’s website later, and are working on getting into the Supreme Court of Canada‘s website right now.”

You want to know our motive? Ask Joel Demore of the Ottawa Police Services. He knows exactly why he forced this to happen, if he just listened and shutup for once, but no, he couldn’t. #opSoaringEagle All media inquires: aerith@mail2tor.com OR @AerithXOR on twitter (email preferred).”

Pastie message from Anonymous hackers:

‘Greetings World,

We are Anonymous. Two weeks ago today, we launched operation Soaring Eagle. #opSoaringEagle. This operation was kept hidden, while we gathered information. We breaching secure systems, and networks. Our target was the Ottawa Police (in Canada).

We hacked into court systems, heard the police talking about how they are scared of us, that they would never plug in anything to a computer we sent them. That is fine, we have other ways to access your network. We left a digital footprint inside your internal systems, find it. We are not going to be stopping, it is time for change. As for Officer Joel Demore (Detective on the Ottawa Police Services) – you have been sending out nasty things, like “ip addresses can’t be faked” and “im soo gay” and “i love porn” among other nasty items. This is just a proof of concept, let it be known, we own you.

For every one technical expect you think you have, we have 20.. 50.. 100.. Do you believe us now? Are we serious enough? Thisis just the start, Operation Soaring Eagle will continue, until we see fit that it is completed. We will be taking over all ottawa police networks, shutdown communications on the internet, hijack domains, servers, and soo much more. It all starts today.

We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not Forgive. We do not Forget.You should has expected us.”

Can IP address be faked?

Yes, IP address can be faked easily. Sometimes hackers can remotely take control of computers and use them as zombies to conduct further cyber attacks. In such cases, the used IP address belongs to the infected computer. However, it’s fairly easy to track down the hacker’s IP address if they didn’t use a third-party (like an online server, VPN) to control victim’s PC.

Based on above assessment, security agencies in Canada should investigate the matter in detail and see if the kid’s computer was hacked and used by someone else or not.

At the time of publishing this article, the Ottawa city and Supreme court websites were restored while it’s been more than 11 hours that the Ottawa police website is still down.

Waqas

Waqas Amir is a Milan-based cybersecurity journalist with a passion for covering latest happenings in cyber security and tech world. In addition to being the founder of this website, Waqas is also into gaming, reading and investigative journalism.

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